1. Technical Field
The inventive arrangements relate generally to methods and apparatus providing advanced operating features for audio only, video only and both video and audio programs recorded on disk media, for example recordable digital video disks, hard drives and magneto optical disks.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various devices have been developed to enable consumers to record video and/or audio programs for later presentation. Such devices include tape recorders, video cassette recorders, recordable compact discs, and most recently, recordable digital video discs (DVD). Hard drives and magneto optical discs have also been used.
A DVD that can be recorded on only once, and thereafter is essentially a DVD read only memory, is referred to by the acronym DVD-R. The acronym DVD-R is also used generally to refer to the write-once, or record-once, technology. Several formats are available for DVD's to be recorded on, erased and re-recorded; that is, overwritten or rewritten. These are referred to by the acronyms DVD-RAM, DVD-RW and DVD+RW. As of this time no uniform industry standard has been adopted. The acronyms DVD-RAM, DVD-RW and DVD+RW are also used generally to refer to the respective rewritable technologies. Reference herein to rewritable DVD technology, devices and methods is generally intended to encompass all of the standards which are now being used, as well as those which may be developed in the future.
In many cases, the program presentations are recorded in the viewer and/or listener's absence, for presentation at a later, more convenient time. This is referred to as time shifting the program. At other times, a program is being viewed and/or listened to without being recorded, and with out any interest in a recording, but the viewer's and/or listener's attention is interrupted, for example by a telephone call or an unexpected visitor. If the viewer and/or listener is watching a television program, for example, and has a cassette tape in a VCR, or can retrieve and load such a cassette tape quickly, the program can be recorded. However, the viewer and/or listener cannot view and/or listen to the program in its entirety, and in a proper time sequence, until after the recording has been completed. The time to completion of the recording can be short or long, depending on the length of the program.
Although rewritable DVD technology is generally available, operation is limited to such basic functions as play, record, fast forward reverse and stop. Pause is available, but only as a counterpart to pause operation in a VCR, for example interrupting the play back of a prerecorded program or interrupting the recording of a viewed program to eliminate commercials from the recording. Unlike computer hard drives, recordable DVD devices have a very significant additional function, which is playing back prerecorded DVD's. Thus, there is an economic incentive to develop rewritable DVD technology, including methods and devices, that can be used instead of a computer hard drive. It is a challenge to provide such devices with improved, advantageous features without compromising the goal of decreasing costs and increasing sales.
One feature which is desirable for recordable DVD devices as well as any other MPEG media recorder, is the ability to automatically identify and selectively skip segments of a recorded video signal. For example, such a feature may be useful for automatically editing out commercial messages from recorded television broadcast signals. “Commercial Skip” is an important feature in the field of video cassette recorders. In this regard, various systems have been disclosed in the context of video cassette recorders to address this problem.
Present commercial skip technology in VCRs looks for black frames 15, 30 or 60 seconds apart. These black frames are used to generate a map of possible commercials in recorded television programming. However, this conventional approach is not entirely satisfactory because it requires one to wait while the system returns to the beginning of the segment to mark the commercial. Moreover, because conventional VCRs do not use MPEG type encoding, they cannot take advantage of more sophisticated video processing methods which can be applied for detecting video program transitions such as may occur during commercial advertisements and between chapters of a video presentation. Further to the extent that conventional VCRs can use other transitional effects as cues to delineate chapter boundaries, the media lacks facility to conveniently enable demarcation and selective playback beginning at such chapter boundaries.